By Gordon Hazlitt '54 and Mark Wood
It's a damp drizzly morning, and the campus appears deserted when Martha Andresen arrives at Crookshank Hall and climbs the stairs to her office in a corner of the second floor.
The office is as bright and light as its inhabitant. Typically all surfaces are covered by stacks of books and papers. A curvaceous bentwood rocker sits serenely amidst the literate litter. Atop a steel filing cabinet sits a replica of Yorick's skull. Andresen notes that in a recent earthquake Yorick fell down and broke his crown, but he still holds a place of honor--not as a symbol of death, but as a reminder that the words of William Shakespeare are still very much alive.
Andresen, the Phebe Estelle Spalding Professor of English, is a senior member of the English department and a master teacher, one of a long line of inventive, dedicated scholar-teachers who have illumined Pomona's reputation. For her, Monday is a two-class day, and this one is especially busy. Walking downstairs to her class "English Lyric Poetry Before 1700," she speaks of the concept of "connecting" as key to her style of teaching. She uses a variety of techniques to involve the students actively in the texts.
This morning the technique is a simple and powerful one: listening. A sub-group of the class is offering a multimedia presentation on several poems by Herbert and Donne, two famous clerics of the early 17th century. A member of the group sets the scene pointing out that both poems deal with death and a hope of salvation. Accentuating their points with moody images on a TV screen and some rather quiet rock music, the students question the class about the two poets' contrasting styles, opening an intense discussion that takes the remainder of the hour. Evaluation sheets are passed out, and each member of the class is asked to critique the presentation. This is an hour of role reversal, when students become teachers and other students grade them. Andresen says not a word during the presentation, but it is clear that her attentive ear has raised the level of the discourse.
On the way to her Shakespeare class she ponders a question put to her by her shadow for the day, "Would I have liked to have been an actor? Yes, I would. I think acting would be great fun, but teaching Shakespeare has acting in it, as well as the scholarship I love."
Indeed, in front of her class, she seems as comfortable as an actor in a favorite role. No lectern. No papers or books. Just Andresen standing in front of the 40 students who were fortunate enough to be at the top of the list for this popular class during the registration rush. With a remarkable memory she pulls quotes from other plays effortlessly, all the while gesturing gracefully with both hands.
Her Shakespeare class is one of those Pomona icons whose gravitational power is such as to pull computer science majors from their monitors and chemistry addicts from the labs. Andresen is proud of this diversity.
This morning the class is examining the famous, edgy banter between Prince Hal and Falstaff in Henry IV, Part I. She asks the class what lies beneath the playful dialog. What really is going on here? True to their elevated SATs, several hands flutter, but the responses seem tentative. A photographer has set up lights around the room in hopes of capturing the class on film. Perhaps his presence, and that of two writers, is an intrusion upon their thoughts.
Andresen takes another step up the aisle and brings death into the classroom.
She speaks of the pervasive signs of death in late medieval England, the mortal danger of all involved in the succession of kings. The response is still cautious. After all these are young immortals. Death? A concept. Not good enough.
So Andresen challenges their imaginations. What would it be like in dear, quiet Claremont if gallows were seen up and down Dartmouth Avenue and dead hanged bodies were left to rot on Foothill Boulevard as was common in Shakespeare's day? This brings a definite stirring, and there is more animation in the discussion, but the end of class arrives, and the students file out, some of them still talking about Shakespeare.
"I love our discussions," notes Jake Oken-Berg '02. "She approaches every lecture with the attitude not of 'How can we dissect this play?' but rather, 'How can we make it come alive? How would Shakespeare envision this part being performed? What clues does he give us that there are several emotions influencing this person? How could that be acted?'"
Out on Marston Quadrangle, walking toward the gym, with the aromatic snap of the evergreens in the damp air, Andresen explains that the students meet regularly in small groups outside of class, some of them later that day, to rehearse scenes from the play for their final projects. Though she may not have chosen an acting career, she expects her students to be actors, getting to know their characters from the inside out, at least for one semester.
"The best way to get inside the text is to approach it as an actor," she explains. "All that I say in class is meant to help them in their performance project, giving them background and techniques for capturing the idea and the dramatic vibrancy of Shakespeare."
For Kristin Kearns '02--who has decided even before completing the course that she wants to take it again, for the sheer joy of it--that's what makes the class unique. "It requires such dedication and commitment to make your part work," she explains. "Acting is very emotional, and when people finally get into their characters, they start to see the play in a very different way."
It's noon, and Andresen makes her way across campus to Rains Center. It is her habit to take advantage of faculty privilege during the noon hour in the gym and pool. Today she is going to try out the exercise machines. To some, the long mirrored room with its dozens of intricate machines might resemble a theater of torture, but Andresen pushes, pulls, stretches and bends with good humor and apparent pleasure.
After exercise is quiet time in Andresen's regimen, time to repair to the comfort of her office and prepare for a busy afternoon. Today she suffers the intrusion of the tagalong writer, and considers the impudent question of whether in her 20 years at Pomona she ever tired of dealing with wave upon wave of bright young people.
"I don't weary of my subject matter or of my students year after year, because my students are wonderfully creative, often irreverent," she says, "and they challenge me with fresh takes on the old themes and texts, and I seek to find ways, always, to inspire and enable their creativity. But I also need the stimulation and comfort that I get with my colleagues and my community activities." She recalls her work on the board of the Los Angeles Shakespeare Festival and the abiding support of her friends on the faculty.
"But my students are more to me than a professional responsibility. I let them in on my life because I believe Shakespeare and poetry must be connected to our lives, the way we actually live them, the pain as well as the joy."
She recalls a recent time of great travail when one of her husband's daughters suffered an accident and had a long, difficult recovery. "During this awful time I came back to my work and the pleasure of my students and found in them the energy I needed to go on. They let me in on their lives--their difficulties and their dreams--and I let them in, to a degree, on mine, often indirectly, but sometimes directly."
By now it is two-thirty and time for Andresen to drive to Claremont High School and pick up her daughter. Emily is 16 and learning to drive. On the way back, Emily takes the wheel, a moment of faith.
Back in her office by three, Andresen attends to an academic responsibility that is unusual for a professor of English. For two years Andresen has served as chairman of Pomona's Medical Sciences Committee, which guides premed students in their search for entrance to medical school.
For many years before that Andresen had served as resident editor to the committee, keeping a professional eye on the quality of the premeds' prose. Two years ago, Larry Oglesby, professor of biology and then chairman of the committee, was medically disabled, leaving a vacuum. Andresen agreed in the crunch to take on this immense responsibility, with the part-time help of Alvin Beilby, emeritus professor of chemistry and a past chairman of the committee.
This year Pomona has 55 premeds and a thousand letters were sent in efforts to place them. Andresen estimates that she spends up to 30 hours a week on this work in addition to her usual teaching load. The work load, however, is balanced by the rewards.
"Mike Jacobs was accepted to Rochester," she says with a smile when Beilby arrives for their weekly conference. "He is ecstatic." A bit later the ecstatic one himself comes by and shakes Andresen's hand and beams. Andresen calls Jacobs '00, born in El Salvador, "a truly self-made man, a triumph of education and opportunity."
The afternoon winds down with several more student appointments. One asks for some guidance in learning about John Donne's scientific interests and another voices apprehension about her MCAT scores. Andresen sympathizes, but focuses the conversation on future strategy.
By this time the reporter is pooped, but Professor Andresen has paced herself. Being newly wed and mother to a "blended family," she is protective of her evening family time. Tonight she makes an exception and returns to campus for a rehearsal of Henry Purcell's opera Dido and Aeneas. The production is a senior project of music major Margaret Hunter '00 who will sing the lead role and who aims for a career in early opera. Andresen has agreed to read the prologue.
As the rehearsal progresses, it becomes clear that this is the kind of learning experience Andresen has been talking about--the sort of personal engagement with art and literature that she seeks for her students. "It is wonderful to be part of this," she explains. "Vocalists and instrumentalists, students and faculty, coming together to capture the elegance of Purcell's music and infuse it with sly humor and tremendous energy."
Andresen takes the stage and begins to read the prologue to the opera with impeccable diction. And so we leave her in the role she most relishes, once again setting the stage for her students, with evident pleasure, for a close encounter with a great work of art.
Gordon Hazlitt '54 is a freelance writer and former editor of Pomona College Magazine. Mark Wood is current editor of PCM.
